


Wherein Temporal Chicanery is, in Fact, the Answer to Everything (But Not Without Considerable Effort)

by Xeillyan



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: (But Only Sometimes), Character Deaths Will Mostly Be Temporary, Crack, Gen, Not Beta Read, Spoilers, Time Loop, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 12:35:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20135545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xeillyan/pseuds/Xeillyan
Summary: ...or, five times Byleth tried and failed to avert disaster, and one time she succeeded. Contains varying degrees of spoilers for every route, a narrator of somewhat dubious reliability, more than a little crack but not constantly, and a great number of extremely close platonic relationships. (May also contain implied romance, eventually.)





	Wherein Temporal Chicanery is, in Fact, the Answer to Everything (But Not Without Considerable Effort)

**Author's Note:**

> At the beginning, spoilers are mostly for the ending of the Golden Deer route, which was the first one I played and therefore the one my Byleth is starting from. I'm almost done my first Black Eagles playthrough (one on Crimson Flower, one on Silver Snow - I'm playing both simultaneously), so there may be a few spoilers for that as well, but those should mostly in the next loop because... well, you'll see why.  
Some dialogue is taken from the game, though that'll probably decrease in future chapters (as a percentage at the very least, since as I'm writing them these things are getting pretty long).

Byleth had been Queen of Fódlan for almost a year when she found herself dreaming again of the great battle between Seiros and Nemesis. The latter, in the black-eyed and decomposing yet somehow still monstrously powerful form she had fought, was a regular fixture of her nightmares, so it was almost a comfort to dream of him alive... in the two and a half seconds before she remembered just what he had done to Sothis and her children. She'd had plenty of nightmares about _that_, too, but fortunately she woke up before she could go too far down that semi-lucid spiral of thoughts about how terribly messed up and just generally awful eighty percent of the things that have ever happened in Fódlan were.

She woke up, blinked, and puffed out a little breath. She closed her eyes and shook her head, and a moment later she looked again, which only confirmed it: she was looking at a room in the Remire village inn through a curtain of dark blue hair.

Now, Byleth liked to look on the bright side about as many things as possible, probably because of the aforementioned all-consuming awfulness that permeated almost everything she learned about the world she lived in and its history. However, in this moment, she had to curse her newfound ability to emote openly... 

...because she was pretty sure that, if her twenty-year-old self had suddenly been launched roughly seven years into the past, her initial reaction wouldn't have been to shriek and tumble out of bed. 

Not a moment later, her father came rushing in, followed by one of his mercenary lieutenants. (Erik? She thought his name might be Erik, but she'd not seen him in some time and could not be entirely sure he was alive back in... well, in the future, and wasn't that something? "Back in the future"? Heh. That sounded made up.)

"Is everything all right in here?" Jeralt asked.

Byleth nodded. "Yes, I'm fine. Sorry for the noise."

A moment later, she realized that they probably wanted her to elaborate, and so she did. "I must've shifted in my sleep - I woke up and I was falling off the bed."

Erik raised an eyebrow. "I've seen you get stabbed and make less of a sound."

Her father frowned mightily at him, which did a good job of forcing a change of topic. It summoned an odd warmth in her chest to see Jeralt's love and (admittedly somewhat too extreme) protectiveness once again, especially now that she knew how to recognize it for what it was.

"Well, at least you woke up on time... come on, everyone's gathering outside," Jeralt said. She followed him to the door, where an oddly frantic scout brought them to a group of three familiar faces.

"Please forgive our intrusion," Dimitri said. Had his voice always been so deep? It'd been so long since she'd heard it that she couldn't remember. "We wouldn't bother were the situation not dire."

"What do a bunch of kids like you want at this hour?" Jeralt asked. 

"We're being pursued by a group of bandits," the prince explained. "I can only hope that you will be so kind as to lend your support."

"Bandits? Here?" Jeralt was right to be surprised: Remire wasn't exactly a frequent target for bandits, probably due to its proximity to the monastery and the large number of knights therein.

"It's true," Edelgard nodded. She looked quite young now - probably because she was - but it struck Byleth that the girl had never gotten any taller. "They attacked us while we were at rest in our camp." 

"We've been separated from our companions and we're outnumbered," Claude elaborated. By her reckoning, she'd seen him not quite two months ago alive and well, so she didn't feel quite so wistful to see him as a teenager again. "They're after our lives... not to mention our gold." 

She recognized the attempt at slyly insinuating that payment would be available for helpful mercenaries, and had to bite back a laugh as she thought of how Dimitri and Edelgard might react if he had been a bit more forthright.

"I'm impressed you're staying so calm considering the situation," Jeralt told them. "Wait... that uniform..."

"Bandits spotted just outside the village," a different scout shouted. "Damn... there are a lot of them." 

With that, Jeralt was ordering the mercenaries out in all different directions to defend the village, and then directing her and the three young nobles into battle against the bandit leader and his core circle.

They worked well together, the five of them. Edelgard expertly blocked almost every attack while Byleth made use of the terrain to bait the bandits into attacking the places where she wasn't, and Dimitri and Claude quickly picked them off once they were in range. Meanwhile, Jeralt led the rest of the mercenaries in keeping the bulk of the bandit force occupied elsewhere.

And then it was over, and they had knocked the bandit leader down and started to talk about what to do next. Just like the first time around, Byleth saw him get back up and rush towards Edelgard. It occurred to her that at least a few of Fódlan's future problems could be solved if she were simply to let the Adrestian Princess be struck down here, but of course she didn't entertain that idea for long. It hadn't been Edelgard's fault, really, when one got down to the root of it.

So Byleth ran forward and, without thinking, thrust her hands forward while her mind worked at a complex series of calculations and logical matrices. The array sprung up before her in a brilliant glow, and two perfectly-formed curls of flame followed not a moment later, engulfing the bandit from either side until all that remained was a charred corpse. 

"You saved me," Edelgard murmured.

"Since when have you known how to use magic?" Jeralt wondered. "And at such a high level, too. Unless I miss my guess, that was Bolganone."

Byleth paled, realizing she had messed up kind of badly. She reached for the Divine Pulse that flowed through her in place of a heartbeat, and began to twist time backwards—

—whereupon she found herself in an empty, black void before a familiar mossy throne. On that throne sat... 

"Sothis!" Byleth rushed forward and wrapped the little goddess in a hug. It had been far too long.

"And you are... Byleth, yes?" Sothis yawned, rubbing her eyes. "Yes, that is correct. All is beginning to return to me. But why have you returned here? And for that matter, how?"

"I'm in the past - back in Remire, the first time you saved me and taught me how to use Divine Pulse," Byleth explained.

Sothis gave a little hum, assuming a thinking pose. "I suppose it would be more accurate to say you are now in the present and hail from the future, would it not?"

"Oh, Sothis. I missed you." This was true, and also probably the only reason Byleth wasn't feeling a little annoyed at the moment.

Sothis tutted softly. "You do know that I have been with you all this time."

"I missed hearing your voice, then," Byleth said. 

"How charming. It simply would not do for you to forget your true purpose in disrupting the flow of time, however - use the Divine Pulse to..." Sothis trailed off. "Are you certain you ought to save the girl? Perhaps it would be kinder to all if you should let her perish here."

Byleth shook her head. "I won't let her die. In the end, she was another victim of those who slither in the dark, right?"

"I suppose you are correct," Sothis sighed. "This will almost certainly make things much harder on you, you know."

Byleth grinned a bit at that. "Well, if you've been with me this whole time, you must know I like a challenge."

"Yes, you are indeed a foolish and stubborn human," Sothis nodded. "Please do not die."

"As you command, goddess," Byleth gave a playful bow, and reversed the flow of time even as Sothis squeaked indignantly at her.

She went just enough to step between Edelgard and the axe and spun on her heel, drawing her sword at exactly the right angle to deflect the blade. The few remaining bandits fled, and Claude gave an impressed whistle.

"Nice reflexes!"

"You... You saved me," Edelgard breathed. "Thank you." 

She didn't get a chance to respond to that before Alois and his fellow knights were rushing towards them and recruiting them back to the monastery. Byleth walked with the students as before, and when asked, she reflexively declared that her loyalties lay with the Leicester Alliance. She couldn't remember what she'd said the first time around, but it looked like one result of this was that Claude spent almost the rest of the walk sticking his tongue out at Edelgard while Dimitri scolded him for his improper behaviour. It was nice to see the prince occupied with such frivolous concerns... and actually alive, unlike last time. Hilda had cried for him, she remembered, but Byleth had only distantly registered his death. There had been so much going on that she was almost numb to hearing of such things by that point.

As they walked through the walls of Garreg Mach and into the audience chamber to meet with Rhea, Byleth caught sight of the graveyard and impulsively squeezed Jeralt in a hug.

Her father stumbled, probably more from surprise than from any actual physical pressure. (Byleth had no illusions about the fact that she was short, and though she was unusually strong for a human, she did not doubt that Jeralt was strong enough not to be held in place by her embrace.)

"What's this?" He asked.

"A hug," Byleth told him simply.

"I know that," Jeralt replied, shooting off a quick glare to silence Alois's laughter. "Why now?" 

"I saw it as we passed by the marketplace. Is this not what children do with their fathers?" Actually, most of what she had seen of a comparatively normal father and child relationship had come from Nader and Claude, and that had involved considerably more clashing of weapons than hugging, but she couldn't exactly say that. Anyway, Raphael and Ashe hugged their respective younger siblings all the time, and they had both basically assumed the role of father figures... and Byleth cut that line of thinking off before she could go too far along and get sucked into another spiral about Fódlan's horribly broken state. She really had to do something about that - and now she had the opportunity to fix things that had been out of reach to her even as the sovereign of a united land. 

Yes, this really was a great opportunity. She kept that in mind as Rhea more or less conscripted her into a teaching position, and used it to steel herself as she went to meet her friends again as strangers.

It was odd to reconcile the young, legitimately lazy version of Hilda with the capable lieutenant she remembered - the one who would grouse and whine about the workload but had nevertheless organized the day to day operations of the monastery and played a huge part in keeping everyone fed and armed during the war. It was odder still to see Leonie, bent on displacing her in Jeralt's esteem with him being alive (which reminded Byleth that she had to work on a plan to keep him that way). Raphael and Ignatz were more or less the same, but it hurt to look at Marianne, bent and utterly defeated by the weight of the curse she still believed in and praying fervently for something no teenaged girl should be made to want. Byleth wished she could take the young noblewoman aside and tell her about what a wonderful Holy Knight she would become, and what a great politician after that, but as it stood, the girl was likely to think it all empty words.

She'd never been close to Lorenz, but now that she knew what to look for, Byleth also saw that Lysithea was having a particularly bad day with her health. She wanted to offer the little mage some sweets or perhaps a cuddly toy, but she didn't have either of those things on her at the moment, and anyway she doubted the gesture would be well received coming from a stranger.

Now that she'd seen her Golden Deer again (minus the students who had transferred in later), she almost turned around and went to tell Manuela and Hanneman that she would like to teach them, please. But no - this was an opportunity, and she had to be smart about how she used it. 

She'd quickly become one of Claude's closest advisors in the war, but had that been because they had been such good friends, or because he respected her as a teacher? Probably some combination of both, actually, but she was willing to bet that the latter would have been enough by itself. If so, perhaps she could avert the worst of the war by getting into Edelgard's confidences and gaining the emperor's ear.

The Black Eagles, then, it would have to be. She made sure to talk to Dimitri and Edelgard about their classmates for show, but she already knew which house she would choose.

~<>~

The first thing that struck her about her new class was that they were all kids. She'd not been close to any of them except Dorothea, the first time around, and so she'd mostly only known them as capable enemy commanders during the war. Here, though, they were kids and notably so - even Edelgard and Hubert, who by this point must've already been deep in their secret activities with the Flame Emperor army.

At first, Hubert was actually scarier as a student than he'd been as an enemy, probably due to the constant not-at-all-veiled threats of assassination should she prove unworthy of associating with Edelgard. After a while, though, she began to realize that that was just his way of expressing affection to the person he cared about most in the world... and that she could probably find a way to foil any assassination attempt he came up with, anyway.

The thing that really struck her about Edelgard was that the princess seemed lonely all the time. Byleth knew about the horrors of the crest experimentation conducted by those who slithered in the dark - she'd done her best to help Lysithea through particularly bad days, both physically and mentally, and she'd understood on an intellectual level that Edelgard might be suffering similarly, but she hadn't really grasped what that meant until she heard the princess wake screaming from a night terror. She listened as the girl described the traumas of her childhood, and resolved to try and help her feel more comfortable with relying on others to help her. The kid really needed a support network, but for some reason seemed averse to really reaching out to her classmates. 

Dorothea was a blessing when it came to breaking down the walls within the class. Byleth paired her with Edelgard for group activities whenever possible, and it looked like she had formed a close friendship with the princess before long. Because Dorothea was also close with Ferdinand, this meant that the young nobleman was forced to make his declarations of rivalry a touch more playful and less serious, which had the added benefit of making Hubert stop openly contemplating when and how to dispose of him. 

Caspar and Linhardt mostly kept to each other's company, but they seemed happy enough and by some miracle both finished their assignments adequately and on time, so she decided to leave them alone for now and focus on helping the others. Ferdinand, probably due to his politically-focused upbringing, seemed to be making a concerted effort to include Petra in social activities, which looked like it was pleasing enough to the Brigid princess. That just left Bernadetta. 

In many ways, the young archer was quite like Marianne. Byleth considered introducing them to each other, but the more she thought about it, the more she concluded that they wouldn't actually find common ground to bond over so much as probably sit together in a silence that would only be broken by the occasional stammered apology. She tried a few clever schemes - some of which even involved enlisting Claude's aid, though she tried to tell herself that this was entirely for the purpose of trying every possible option to help her student like a good teacher should and not because she wanted to hang out with her best friend - and nothing really worked. Except for (and sometimes including) class time, Bernadetta stayed in her room.

Eventually, though, Byleth happened to hear it third hand that Bernadetta liked cooking. From then on, she invited the shy girl to cook something for the class with her once a week, and enlisted the help of some other students to air out her room during that time. It wasn't much, but it would help to keep her from getting sick, and it was a step that didn't send Bernadetta into a panic, so Byleth counted that as a win.

~<>~ 

For a little over a month, things settled into a routine. Byleth woke up early, sparred with her father and resisted the urge to hug him constantly (instead settling for a maximum of four hugs a week - Claude and Hilda had showed her the joys of such affectionate gestures, and she had to say she was more than a little hooked), and taught class six days a week. On her free days she always went to the greenhouse at dawn with Ashe and Dedue, and would join some other early risers for breakfast in the dining hall before starting some extra training. She'd find different people to hang out with at lunch, and then spend the afternoon either working on her lesson plans or helping various monastery residents with their problems. Finally, just as she had when she'd taught the Golden Deer, she'd carefully eat a reduced portion of dinner and invite small groups to sit with her for "academic meetings". She invariably had to do this anywhere between two and five times in order to make sure her students were eating.

A little break in the routine came, however, the week after she took her students out on to escort some merchant caravans and rout a group of bandits on the way back. She heard a knock at the door when she had sat down to grade some assignments, and opened it to find Cethleann.

It'd been a while, back in her future, since Byleth had seen the green-haired girl, but by the time they had parted she had asked all of their friends to use her real name. The professor had gotten quite used to it - so used to it, in fact, that when she greeted the saint that morning, she completely forgot about the alias until Sothis shouted it at her.

"Hello, Ceth-fleeeaann—!" Byleth choked just the slightest bit, then made a show of clearing her throat. "Ahem. Good morning, Flayn. Is there anything you wanted in particular?"

Cethleann - no, Flayn, she went by Flayn at this point and Byleth had to be sure to remember that. _Flayn _gave her an odd look, but it seemed like she was ignoring the slip-up for now. She'd probably talked to Ignatz and realized that she bore more than a passing resemblance to... well, to herself. (As a side note, the professor still couldn't believe how long it had taken the boy to realize Flayn's true identity, since to Byleth's knowledge that had been just about the first thing he'd ever said to her.)

"My brother has been caught up in a meeting and wished me to pass along these documents regarding the procedures for organizing excursions other than the monthly mission," Flayn said, producing the mentioned documents.

Byleth nodded. "Thank you. I'll be sure to refer to these next time I take my students afield for training." 

"It is no problem," Flayn smiled serenely. "Incidentally, Professor, were you about to call me something else just now? Perhaps 'Cethleann'?"

Oh. Oh, no. Byleth felt her eyes bug out a bit, and wished very much she could retract her slip-up... and then it occurred to her that she was perhaps the one person in the world who was literally capable of doing that. She began to reverse the flow of time, and then remembered that she had only ever done that in battle... except, apparently, for the time in the future that had brought her back to the Officer's Academy.

"Honestly! Is there not a single bit of sense in you?" Sothis called as the world faded to black, and then to the dream of Seiros and Nemesis once more.


End file.
